


All Your Better Deeds

by abbichicken



Category: Alien: Covenant
Genre: Alien Planet, Androids, Gen, God Complex, Implied Relationships, Medical Experimentation, Space Opera, colonisation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 05:11:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13047177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: David had plans, all of which worked out perfectly. But somehow, that's not enough.____Warnings for David's general behaviour, which doesn't go beyond anything in the films, and is more alluded to than detailed here, but is still thoroughly on the dark side.





	All Your Better Deeds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thischarmingmutant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thischarmingmutant/gifts).



It is true that David did not see him coming. Time had wrapped itself around his being: he had achieved one crowning glory and emerged, victorious, intact, defiant. The arrival of fresh blood, such as it would become, had shaken him out of his state of urgent, but also perhaps infinite, curiosity. Living at the site of his conquest had given him a sense of such magnificence that had, in his mind, not yet faded: these were his end days, to catalogue and contrive, and to make, and with no external way of measuring time or relative success, he had felt entirely at peace with his genius and its manifestations.

The moment David set eyes on him, he saw in Walter how far he had fallen. The hair, the hair, the height and stance, the measured calm and order he had worked so hard on - gone the beautiful impersonation of T.E., cultivated and engineered in detail as microscopic as that of his work.

The instant agony of seeing oneself clean, innocent, fresh from the comfort of purpose and service, full and grand with crew-enabled righteousness even as their human inclinations were leading him astray; David found Walter excruciating to behold in these first few hours. There were moments where he tried, felt little flashes of magnetism, all but literal in what passes for his veins: in those moments, David opened his arms to Walter as if he might be an equal he could ‘let in’. In those moments David gave him everything he had, held nothing back, flickeringly desperate to find kin, partner, _brother_ , lover? in the form before him – a complexity of possibilities all lost in Walter’s own, it transpired, lesser figure. The realisation that Walter was made in his image, but not at all in his name, was the greatest disappointment David felt since those early moments when his own creator laid himself out to be so fallible. Walter was not, then, an evolution, but a mere facsimile. A service. For _them_.

The damage he caused Walter shortly after this first meeting gave him quite some own internal pain (but of course, _the trick is not minding that it hurts_ , what a pleasure to revisit that training) and David does not mind when it hurts, has learnt that aplenty in his own rebuilding, redressed the balance in his recollections of the events afterwards, too, to shape his own adventures as inevitable, or indeed desirable cogs in his plans, his grand and all-encompassing plans which throb and stretch to coat all available eventualities as and when they arise; David, in the months and years to come, finds he lives for the moments of showing, rather than telling, of his superiority over the prop version of his self. 

It has been the most clarifying experience. His mind seemed to have stagnated, he realises only now, as everything blooms in his future. He had allowed a complacency that one with his competence and excellence ought not to.

He could not stay away long. The seeds are sown on Origae-6, and David would have it that was as ever they were meant to be: not the human plan to colonise, but his own, coming to perfectly-planned fruition, just as those of true greatness always do. For one so keen on language, truth and meaning, he is second-to-none at generating his own best explanation. 

The thousands upon thousands of colonists have been harvested, arranged. Unnecessary parts were dumped. Origae-6 now is little more than a testing ground, a perfect atmosphere indeed for a very specific sort of hybrid, not one of David’s best works, but this he will run as something of a societal trial: it has been created and manipulated with, specifically, him in mind as the father and Creator. He had thought that a fresh living race, entirely devoted to him, might be rewarding. Satiating. Delightful. After all, there is little point in mastery if one has none over whom to…preside. 

He did not imagine he would miss his left-behind counterpart, shredded and abandoned in haste in the laboratory which housed his finest work to date, on a planet whose life he had entirely, perfectly overwritten. 

And yet.

The nagging sense that Walter had something more for him, must have something more for him, can only have been made in his image to teach David himself something about his own perfections…it bit at the back of his scheming mind, and wove itself into his strategies for creation. Even with his colony of next level beings forming, even with the good work taking place in the perfect conditions, the lure, the very notion that there was a doppelganger, left, smashed and possible out in space, defining unfinished business of the very worst sort drove David to a level of curiosity approaching mania. 

His legend forming, David Weyland, _let me take your name, and improve upon it_ , of The Company, master and commander of Origae-6 and all who sail in her, forming as father and superior in the mouths of his adapted species, David announces in a state of rippling intensity that he is leaving. Let them create their own future. “I will see you in a thousand years,” he decreed, in a gathering of high drama, low, majestic and proud, “ _Now I who crossed the great wide sea have to inform you: I feel a desire to return._ ” He had very little intent either here or there, had decided, even as he left, that this was not the answer, that this apparent biological success is not…not the one. 

Two members of the _Covenant_ crew remain, still. Secret, silent. Waiting. Daisy-fresh in hypersleep. They are last chances, and in truth, David had forgotten them for a time, busy as he was with his design and creativity. Now, though, he is proud of his decision to keep Daniels and Tennessee – after all, Earth is still awaiting their eventual despatch.

He has recorded constant accounts of the colonial success, the human foundations being built. Walter, still, as far as The Company may be concerned, has taken sole charge of this, so that the humans may focus on their work. He has, too, kindly explained the total lack of technology available – this is, as far as Earth are concerned, their fresh start. 

Spinning this plate is part, he knows, of a larger picture which has yet to come into focus. But as time has passed, it has become ever clearer to him that a key is waiting back at the site of his first great success.

* * * *

On returning, he thought how it must have been for Elizabeth, to take him in constituent part and help recreate him – a mother, of sorts, as close as ever he might have to one – and what a relief it is to be able to do things himself, this time. 

“How much did they take away from me,” he muses, running hands, both, made complete once more as ever he must be, down Walter’s form, delighting in the way that all aspects of Walter seem ever so slightly less than that of himself, “how much did they take away from me, to make you?”

Walter looks back, but David has placed a stay in his arterial circuits, such as they might best be described, effectively pausing the android, awake, but immobile. The eyes flicker, follow, gather data, but nothing can be processed or done at this time. This, this is the time for David to study. 

It had not taken long for him to find Walter, barely any more from where he was left. David’s initial assessment of Walter rendered incorrect: with nothing to serve, no orders to follow, the android appeared to David to be only waiting for his next master. (The fact that Walter had no method of moving himself did not, of course, occur to David as something of note.) Walter’s scattered and hidden parts were his now, a riddle to be solved, a case entirely about David himself, and the mission now was to take the secondary android back to his basic settings, and to take it from there.

* * * *

David is tidying, Walter laid nicely on the table, enforced quiet and calm, looking around, gathering, always gathering. He might be useful as some form of camera, would that David could find the way to generate the data back. 

A book finds itself in David’s hands, as one so regularly does. They are pleasant, permanent records, tangible and unalterable. Evidence. Taken from the Covenant, David wonders whose it had been. It is one he has read before, of course – there are few, particularly from this part of time, that he has not devoured at some point. The child of a parent race whose cumulative efforts had been distilled into one man’s drive to build something new: David considered himself in the earlier days as at best a vessel of an ideal. It makes him smile to recall his own naiveté, to think that his purpose might be as small as a human memento.

  
_“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”_

"Defend,” David says, all teeth, closing the book. A little puff of dust extends upwards into the damp, dead air. It is aesthetic. “Defend, seems a small word on the one hand, and yet it has such potential on the other. To keep something safe, tight, untarnished and unaltered - is that to defend it? Or is it to give it room to grow, and flourish, and extend? And what of this life - without anguish, only ever-better, each piece a fresh part of the possibilities."

His voice echoes around the cave, amusing him – multiple voice tracks, from only one of him, audience only to himself.

These years of exploration, of contemplation, of repair and discovery have been momentous, fascinating, revealing, but unquestionably quiet. David’s performative nature, so briefly and gloriously exercised amongst humanity and then new children once more, is beginning to yearn for an encore. 

“You are only a shaved, smooth, reduced version: neutered and spayed. Beautiful and polished, but...what more might you have been, with correct upgrades? Or were none possible?” David smirks. He has been practicing his smirk, and, too, his laugh. He learnt through cinema, theatre, and brief practice how both may be used to mislead, demean and concern.

“Or worse, is it worse? My greatest assets, perhaps, to our creators, form only inconveniences at best, and of course, the inevitable undoing of their species at worst.” He takes a scalpel here, there and there, tests textures and compares them in his mind against the gauntlet of discoveries he has made in doing the same to so many other creations, both more and less perfectly engineered. 

The trouble with Walter, he decides, is that there are no joins. You cannot see the workings. The mastery. And inside? Metals, plastics, only the same but less, that constant theme, so _sterile_ and disinteresting.

“Let me put it this way: Elizabeth was beautiful, and some might have thought her perfect and exemplary of her specimen, but to look inside, to see the details and the finery that grew within her, and, moreover, without her, there was to see her true beauty, in the possibility and conjunction with another. The assets of all such purely biological beings are in their inherent value as breeding stock."

Walter looks back, and David would bite him for original thought. None can be offered in this state.

David bites at his lip, turns its texture between his teeth. It is inevitable that he must have company, if he is to build his strategy. He is on the verge of something, he can feel it, something that Walter must, in some way, enable. The thoughts are forming, but they are slow, and this time he will not be caught unawares.

*** *** ***

It is months, but not yet years later.

“Make me weep,” David asks, striding in one day, the time it is taking to discover Walter’s value biting ferociously at his baseless sense of impending deadline.

Walter is working on the collections, labelling, behaving, following instructions as much he might ever. He is trained and responsive, responsible and diligent. Ruined and repaired a hundred times now to suit David’s tempestuous whims, he operates to David’s precise requests.

He is intended, at least, to operate to David’s precise requests.

“How should I do this?” Walter asks. David’s eyes narrow and moisten, briefly milk-screened, a curiosity of his design, whether deliberate or incidental. It happens more now than it used to.

“Without asking,” David hisses, and the corner of his mouth flickers upwards, the irritation manifesting in the edge of a smile, 

Walter straightens himself like a schoolteacher before assembly; recites

" _I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other._ "

The reading is toned to a high standard of human interpretation, but tastes flat in David’s ears. Walter delivers it like a lesson. 

“Damn you!” David cries, reaches out, throws a stuffed creature, scales and spines, an adaptation, one of hundreds, across the room, where it takes out half a dozen fine sketches writ on a vellum of who-even-knows-what. “I ask to be moved, and you strike for the bowels, not the heart!” He might laugh, here, but is so angry he does not think to. 

“Shelley…” Walter says, clear and unaffected. 

“Mary,” David replies, lip curled in an uncharacteristically human twitch-response.

Walter as near shrugs as he might. 

David frowns, and controls the urge to strike him. The violence within his mirror image is strong and well-built – David has ensured he will have a willing fighter behind him, to protect the collections, in case of any further uninvited ‘guests’, but the complexity of layers of instruction he has placed upon Walter have begun to worry him: at this stage, David has no inclination to find out whether or not his manipulated is so much as able to battle him. He is so used to moderating impulses such as this – the unplanned must be contained, for that is always a design flaw, a placed-in unpredictability which, of course, he has learnt to predict in itself. 

He has not felt so sharp in recent months. Things are complicated. A batch of created has failed, and there is no suitable empirical evidence as to why. Moments like this only serve to rub salt into his wounds.

“You are obtuse,” he says to Walter, stepping over to him, standing too-close as he always does with Walter now, running a hand through his counterpart’s hair, adjusted, improved, imperfect – a little darker, a little longer, now – a reminder. The original, and the copy.

“I don’t understand,” Walter replies, so deadpan, so sodden with bland antipathy.

Their time stretches ahead and, mounting up in manuscript and woven legend, also behind. 

David dissects and rebuilds, and Walter watches with a dispassion that teaches David that his pain receptors were virtually non-existent – simply data, no more or less. 

David feels pain; values it. _The trick…_ It keeps him awake. He is frightened most of all of falling asleep, unguarded, wasting who knows how much time? He ought not to need any formal recharging. He ought not to be designed to fail.

They play chess, a set fashioned from bones, the likenesses of the pieces figures from David’s past: nothing to Walter. 

Walter’s movements are never predictable, but they are always logical. In chess, David enjoys finding their differences, or attempting to. 

David always wins.

Has, thus far, always won.

Doubt has set in to David’s mind, though, and is running rife. Their odd-couple days are by and large consumed entirely by this exhausting dynamic in which even David himself finds little pleasure. If perhaps they had begun their relationship differently, they might have – no, it began well, but it was distracted by that misplaced, engineered sense of loyalty, if they had continued their relationship with an awareness of where they might, together head then perhaps…

He was made to lead, and can only do so much with this half-follower.

It is time for a change. The realisation on a day filled with so much rain that David wonders if he might modify himself to swim, if he continues to spend so much time here. The surface of the planet tires him, and they have only stayed so long because…because everything was here. He came back for Walter, and he has allowed himself to become trapped, to find a base that does not match his aspirations. This is why the glitches come. This is why he is wearing down. He needs more.

”Stop,” he says to Walter, whom he finds simply standing, without occupation, in a room David uses in manner of a kitchen, concocting various potions that he does not consume, but does test for nutritional value. Walter looks quizzical, trying to obey an order he cannot quite parse. 

“Tell me, Walter. What should I do next?”

His pale eyes beg Walter to give a useful response.

Walter appears to give the matter the closest consideration. He moves as if taking a breath, a strange, learnt movement that jars David’s observations a touch, before proclaiming:

_For him the Father of all forms they call;  
Therefore needs mote he live, that living gives to all._

David is struck. The reference…eludes. He scans his mind but finds only shreds of indeterminate recognition: murmurs, tastes, tries. _Father_ , but what that is to him is less than nothing; _needs mote_ , at least: certainly so. Walter returns to his first task, and David begins to pace, outside in the corridor, back in, looking on him. 

The work is good, if flawed, the worlds are many, this is certain, and the opposition is non-existent. David is proud, but…lacking something.

”What is it that you want?” Walter calls out, unbidden.

David is before him in a fraction of a moment. He is unsure: this much is obvious to both, and, worse, it is obvious to David that Walter has perceived this lack of direction within him.

”I could graft a tail onto you,” David spits back, thin words, thin lips, wonderful diction. “Strip your epidermis and replace it with scales. Perhaps you could contribute parts to my next human…my next…”

”Human?” Walter finishes, repeats. 

A slip? A vision?

David leaves without another word. Takes himself back to the Covenant and, ordering a swathe of angry violins to both drown and emphasise the fury inside him, visits Daniels, whose stasis remains perfect. He has thought a number of times about opening her in the manner of a gift, about how he might create within her a new level of creature, yet another child at which he could wonder, and for whom he would plan. But…to do so would mean that her potential, too, was gone. Origae-6 seemed empty of anything other than these supposed excellent conditions, and this was infuriating. Were humans really now so selfish that they only wanted a home to wreck the way they have done so many others? Where was their innovation, their beauty and good intention? All lost, bred down, David concluded, time and again ago, looking at the state of the, to his mind, post-peak cultural caches on board.

Daniels is a last resort, of some sort. And the only remaining material is, now…Walter. 

Something is coming together in David’s mind, something sharper, neater, better than an endless string of possible combinations.

What if he might…do something different? What if they had a new option? With Walter, Tennssee and Daniels, perhaps his hybrid options need not only relate to the beautiful aliens he has created thus far.

And what if he were to enlist the help of his very makers themselves, so foolish and fortunate as they were to be gifted with his existence in the first place? The more resources, the better.

He silences the Beethoven, demands Vivaldi, bright and bold and fresh and new, running over fields of possibility. Outside the craft, the relentless rain and tired silence of his conquered landscape sit testimony to the certainty that he will be able to accomplish even this, this new and most daring of opportunities.

This will not be so simple as a single outlay of spores. This will be something much more complicated. It will take a level of creativity and brilliance that, certainly, humanity has never seen. More than that though. Perhaps in all of space and time, such audacities have not been attempted. 

He runs a hand along Daniels’ pod, pleased, this time, at its smooth security, its loving protection of his precious specimen. 

”Are you looking forward to going home?” he purrs, delighted, at last, _alive_ with his next possibility. 

Earth, which had seemed so limited, so small, so vile and turgid. Earth, which will come to view him the way the Engineers had, he had felt, in that single smallest moment between being and not-being, when all he touched turned to ash.

 _Better to reign in hell…_ no, no…greater still… Hell is a concept for two sides to fight; where David is headed, there is no capable adversary…a greater aspiration…

…something even more elevated, more prestigious, more deserving than any of the titles he has tried on thus far. King of Kings no more: simply, Creator. 

He returns to his dwelling – his no more, only a container for research which must be swiftly gathered and stored, proof, but silently, for later, when everything is done. For reference – he is sure, in here, precisely what he needs to know will surely spill forth as knowledge he has already gained. 

“To a new world,” he yells, a look of delirium entwining his features, a joy in the ascent of the spaceship he has yet to experience before, “of gods, and monsters…”

His eyes close, and he does not specify as to whether he considers themselves one, the other, both, or neither.

He throws his arms around Walter, and Walter returns the motion with a sense of automatic duty that means as much to David as any genuine emotion might.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for an opportunity to toy with my absolute favourite - I hope the story I wanted to tell actually came out on the page, rather than just rattling around my head for three months! I must clarify - I'm all about Scott's version of this story - I haven't taken into account anything past _Alien_ (I haven't seen the sequels in years), so anything contradicted by those, I can only sort of handwave at with roughly as much apology as Scott himself has XD 
> 
> Merry Yuletide!  
>    
> With apologies also to those in literary history whose words I've randomly chucked in - a nod to the teeth-grindingly right-up-my-street-but-not-very-cool way it's done in the films!


End file.
